The Indirect Question in Latin

Guest arti­cle writ­ten by Peter Bar­rios-Lech Asso­ciate Pro­fes­sor of Clas­sics, Col­lege of Lib­er­al Arts, Uni­ver­si­ty of Massachusetts.

I. An All-Too Direct Question About The Indirect Question.

One evening, about an hour before the start of my night-time Roman com­e­dy sem­i­nar, three of us – two grad­u­ate stu­dents and I – met in my office to under­take our week­ly rite of sight read­ing from Plau­tus. The goal was to bet­ter under­stand Plau­tine Latin, which, as I would soon learn, is not always as sim­ple as it appears.

So, that night, the Pseudo­lus, with its typ­i­cal Plau­tine plot. A young man has fall­en in love with a pros­ti­tute. He doesn’t have the mon­ey to pur­chase her from her pimp. So he demands that his slave get the need­ed mon­ey, using that cun­ning that gave him his name, Pseudo­lus, (ψευ-dolos, “Mon­sieur Flim-Flam”). 

Here are the first lines of that play, first pro­duced in 191 B.C., in front of the tem­ple to the Great Moth­er, Magna Mater. The tem­ple steps are packed with seat­ed audi­ence mem­bers; there is stand­ing room only for the pre­miere of the lat­est com­e­dy-opera from the now leg­endary six­ty or so year old Umbri­an poet. Sit your­self down among these spec­ta­tors to watch the open­ing tableau. Do you see the young man, dressed in the ele­gant hima­tion? The youth grasps two wood­en leaves, each cov­ered on one side with wax, inscribed with a mis­sive from his enslaved girl­friend. He sobs: Eheu!Eheu! The audi­ence laughs as Pseudo­lus enters from the wing, scur­ry­ing behind, his grotesque mask, with the flanged lips of its mouth, twist­ed into a mock­ing smile. From that aper­ture, the actor play­ing Pseudo­lus booms forth the famous open­ing lines one morn­ing – this morn­ing – on the Pala­tine. His mock­ing­ly shrill voice con­trasts with audi­ble sobs of the youth, pro­vok­ing fur­ther tit­ters from the audience:

(1.)

Ps. Licet me id scire quid sit? nam tu me antidhac 

supre­mum habuisti comitem con­sili­is tuis. 

Cal. Idem ani­mus nunc est. Ps. Face me cer­tum quid tibist;  

iuvabo aut re aut opera aut con­silio bono. (Pl. Ps. 16–19, Leo)

Ps. Can I know what the mat­ter is?? After all, I’ve always been

your colonel, cap­tain, con­sigliere in chief (mock-salutes).

Cal. (glances between sobs) You con­tin­ue to be. Ps. Then bring me into the loop: 

(cool­ly) I’ll help with cash, ser­vice-on-demand, or good advice. (Pl. Ps. 16–19, Leo)

Right now, we do not focus on ques­tions of stag­ing, on the play as a doc­u­ment of mid-Repub­li­can Roman cul­ture; on plot and char­ac­ter­i­za­tion – those ques­tions we’ll broach in class, lat­er on. Right now, our aim is to come to grips with the language.

À pro­pos, one stu­dent asks, “why does Pseudo­lus use the sub­junc­tive here (she points to the first line, bold­ed), but not also here (third line, also bolded)? 

I hes­i­tate; com­pli­ment the stu­dent: this is a sharp obser­va­tion. I have no good answer. Maybe meter is at stake in the sec­ond instance (face me cer­tum quid tibist); maybe at this peri­od of Latin there was more vari­a­tion of mood in the indi­rect ques­tion clause. We head to class, and I resolve some­day to find a bet­ter answer.

II. Revisiting The Golden Rule On The Indirect Question. 

Every­one knows the rule about the indi­rect ques­tion in Clas­si­cal Latin. Here are some well-known ver­sions of it in gram­mars used across Amer­i­can col­lege classrooms:

(2.)

“An Indi­rect Ques­tion takes its verb in the Sub­junc­tive” (Allen and Gree­nough, §574)

(3.)

“[t]he Depen­dent Inter­rog­a­tive is always in the Sub­junc­tive” (Gilder­sleeve and Lodge § 467)

So, accord­ing to the rule, you want to say nescio cur legam hanc sym­bo­l­am “I don’t know why I’m read­ing this essay,” not nescio cur lego hanc sym­bo­l­am.

In Ger­man gym­na­sia,or high schools, the sub­junc­tive in that depen­dent clause was required, “[a]ccording to the rule in Clas­si­cal Latin – a rule which teach­ers stamped into the mem­o­ry of their stu­dents, [that] the sub­junc­tive stands in all sub­or­di­nate inter­rog­a­tive claus­es” (Wack­er­nagel, Lec­tures on Syn­tax, 1929, I, 242).

So was the rule stamped into my mem­o­ry, and that of many oth­er Latin stu­dents. But now, in light of a student’s keen obser­va­tion, I want­ed to revis­it this Gold­en Age Latin precept. 

III. Getting The Data

How often was the indica­tive used in Latin indi­rect ques­tion claus­es? More often in cer­tain authors? Gen­res? Maybe it was just an “Ear­ly Latin” thing? Would gath­er­ing data and, iso­lat­ing pat­terns from it help to under­stand the vari­a­tion we saw?

Ide­al­ly, I would have gath­ered all the indi­rect ques­tions in Ear­ly and Clas­si­cal Latin. Real­is­ti­cal­ly, I could prob­a­bly cov­er the sub­ject just for Ear­ly Latin. I found a pock­et of time unclaimed by oth­er oblig­a­tions – my train ride back home – dur­ing which I could read. And so, Plau­tus, Ennius, Cato, Pacu­vius, Ter­ence, Accius, Lucil­ius, and oth­er hoary Ear­ly Latin authors became my trav­el­ling com­pan­ions for about a year’s worth of MBTA train rides, Boston to Prov­i­dence, back home from work.

I began with – who else? – Plau­tus, col­lect­ing on a spread­sheet any indi­rect ques­tion I found, tag­ging each token – each indi­vid­ual instance – with infor­ma­tion about mood used, the “head” verb (for instance scio quid agas, vide num vener­it, and so on); sub­or­di­na­tor (quid and num in the exam­ples just men­tioned); speak­er and addressee, and more. I prob­a­bly spent equal amounts of time star­ing at the Latin, as I did at my Excel spreadsheets.

But it was worth it, because, to be hon­est, this project was moti­vat­ed only in part by my desire to get the answer; it was also at least in equal mea­sure dri­ven by the desire to revis­it some of my favorite authors – the fel­low com­muters I men­tioned above.

Once they had sur­ren­dered the data to me, I start­ed look­ing through it. What did I find?

IV. Wilhelm Studemund

Brief digres­sion. I actu­al­ly am not the first per­son (crazy enough?) to try this. 135 years ago, in the hotbed of Latin stud­ies that was late 19th C. Strass­burg, Ger­many, Wil­helm Stude­mu­nd had gained great fame by deci­pher­ing a palimpsest that was thought near­ly illeg­i­ble, the famous Ambrosianus (MS A), rep­re­sent­ing our ear­li­est (5th C CE) wit­ness to Plau­tus, whose come­dies had been copied down in M(anu)S(criptus) A(mbrosianus/a) with beau­ti­ful Rus­tic Cap­i­tals. Stude­mu­nd had a nose for unearthing the text hid­den under or between the lines of palimpses­ts. For instance, he had also dis­cov­ered the let­ters of Fron­to latent for cen­turies under­neath the records, the Acta, of the Coun­cil of Calche­don. Any­way, long before Stude­mu­nd had got­ten to it, the Plau­tus man­u­script, “A” had been writ­ten over with a com­men­tary on the Book of Kings. Then, in the 19th C., a cer­tain Car­di­nal Ange­lo Mai had used a chem­i­cal to try to recov­er the under­ly­ing text of Plau­tus, but in effect did much dam­age to it. Stude­mu­nd, in lat­er deci­pher­ing the dam­aged text, end­ed up los­ing his sight (the whole sto­ry can be found in Texts and Trans­mis­sions, pp. 302–307). 

As he worked on his tran­scrip­tion, Stude­mu­nd was also over­see­ing a ver­i­ta­ble hive of activ­i­ty in the field of Ear­ly Latin. His grad­u­ate stu­dents pub­lished their find­ings in a work titled Stude­mu­nds Stu­di­en, or “Studemund’s Stud­ies”; they can be read here and here (the lat­ter a search­able ver­sion only). (That’s the title, but with­in the vol­ume, each indi­vid­ual opus­cu­lum is duly attrib­uted to its author) They are exam­ples of a tra­di­tion of philol­o­gy that con­tin­ues today, with the dif­fer­ence that some of Studemund’s stu­dents wrote the mono­graphs in Latin. (Not a few clas­si­cists, how­ev­er, have begun reviv­ing this time-hon­ored tra­di­tion, that of pub­lish­ing seri­ous schol­ar­ship in Latin, see here and here; not to men­tion the many con­tri­bu­tions to this very site.) 

Among the Stu­di­en, you will find Paulus Richter’s 254-page Latin mono­graph on inter­jec­tions – every­thing you want­ed to know about heus, eheu, aha, and more.Among the Stu­di­en, you’ll also find Eduard Becker’s mono­graph on the Ear­ly Latin indi­rect ques­tion – writ­ten in a lucid peri­od­ic style. Work­ing my way through it, I soon real­ized that Beck­er had read every­thing. From the extant 26 Roman come­dies, and the frag­ments of lost Ear­ly Latin dra­ma, to the frag­ments from Lucil­ius’ lost Satires and Ear­ly Latin inscrip­tions, all of this in the time before PHI, JSTOR, Google, and super-fast Inter-Library Loan. Becker’s work has been so fun­da­men­tal, that it has informed every­thing writ­ten on the indi­rect ques­tion since: his prin­ci­pal find­ings are basi­cal­ly those you’ll find in the stan­dard ref­er­ence gram­mars. No-one has real­ly super­seded Beck­er, and had I known about him, I might not have even embarked on what now, hav­ing read his mono­graph, seemed like a fool­hardy mission.

V. The Becker Rules 

There are cas­es where the indica­tive is nor­mal in indi­rect ques­tions. Here are sev­er­al, elu­ci­dat­ed by Becker:

INDICATIVE IS NORMAL IN THE INDIRECT QUESTION CLAUSE WHEN

The main-clause verb is a verb of ‘say­ing’ and it is imper­a­tive in mood. Typ­i­cal are phras­es like obse­cro her­cle loquere, quis is est (Pl. Bac. 553), “tell me, please, where he is!” The indica­tive in such indi­rect ques­tions is nor­mal because, as Beck­er explains, loquere adds empha­sis, but is hard­ly nec­es­sary to the syn­tax; that is, you could express the same urgent ques­tion with­out loquere. And so, loquere and relat­ed forms, like dic, cedo, and nar­ra,when intro­duc­ing indi­rect claus­es, func­tion more like emphat­ic par­ti­cles than ‘real’ main-clause verbs. 

The excep­tions are numer­ous enough that we should prob­a­bly speak of a ten­den­cy rather than a rule. Thus, of all the instances of such ques­tions in Plau­tus (those like obse­cro her­cle loquere, quis is est), 23% (36 out of the total 158 rel­e­vant instances) have the sub­junc­tive; and, in Ter­ence, 20% (11 out of 54) have the sub­junc­tive where we might have expect­ed the indica­tive. Here is an exam­ple:  loquere por­ro, quid sit actum (Pl. Mer. 199): “tell me, what happened.” 

What is the dif­fer­ence between loquere por­ro, quid sit actum and obse­cro her­cle loquere, quis is est? I per­son­al­ly don’t see any. Prob­a­bly, back when these lines were first uttered aloud to a Roman audi­ence, each had a dis­tinc­tive into­na­tion­al con­tour: maybe the sec­ond was pro­nounced as two into­na­tion­al units (Tell me: who is he?) and the first as one (tell me what hap­pened). But maybe, in anoth­er ear­ly per­for­mance of this same play, anoth­er actor pro­nounced the ques­tions with a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent intonation. 

Exclaim­ing some­thing. Excla­ma­tions and ques­tions draw from the same set of ‘ques­tion’ words. This is as true in Eng­lish (“what won­der­ful weath­er!” and “what is the weath­er like today?”) as it is for Latin. Here’s a flab­ber­gast­ed woman ask­ing her hus­band if he under­stands the con­se­quences of his exces­sive pun­ish­ment of their son: non vides quan­tum mali ex <ea> re excites? (Ter. Hau. 1013), “don’t you see how much trou­ble you’re caus­ing because of it?”. And here is a tricky slave, point­ing out that his own intel­li­gence super­sedes that of his notion­al bet­ter:  o Phaedria, incredibile[st] quan­tum erum ante eo sapi­en­tia (Ter. Ph. 247), “O Phaedria, it’s incred­i­ble how far I excel mas­ter in wisdom!” 

The sec­ond is not a ques­tion at all: it is an excla­ma­tion. While ques­tions seek answers (as the woman’s does, in the first exam­ple from Ter­ence), excla­ma­tions present some propo­si­tion (“how smart I am!”) as exceed­ing expec­ta­tions, and thus as wor­thy of note. No won­der, then, as Beck­er rea­soned, indi­rect ques­tions like the tricky slave’s don’t take the indica­tive: for they are not ques­tions of any kind, at all. 

To repeat: excla­ma­tions ask us to notice some­thing that is, well, note-wor­thy. Some­times, in Ear­ly Latin plays, the char­ac­ter asks us or some­one direct­ly to note some­thing sur­pris­ing, as, for instance, in the fol­low­ing, about the high cost of liv­ing in late 3rd C. BCE Rome: uiden ut annonast grauis? (Pl. St. 1070), “do you see how expen­sive the cost of liv­ing is?” Again, no ques­tion is being asked here. Rather the speak­er – a slave in this play – asks us to con­sid­er what is – for him – an upset­ting propo­si­tion. You don’t even need the viden (or vide):  ut annonast gravis! would also have done the trick. It turns out that any­time an excla­ma­tion is intro­duced first by a call to notice – viden or vide – the sub­or­di­nate clause always has the indicative.

There are oth­er ten­den­cies I could give. For instance, when the verb dico heads an ut clause, as in dico her­cle ego quoque ut fac­turus sum (Pl. As. 376), an indica­tive always appears in the ut clause. I’m not sure why this is. Maybe such phras­es are calques, or loan trans­la­tions, of the Greek indi­rect ques­tion, which doesn’t as a rule, take any par­tic­u­lar mood, and is intro­duced with ὡς (equiv­a­lent to Latin ut when it means “how”). At any rate, the two ten­den­cies I just iso­lat­ed above are the most clear-cut. 

VI. The Difference Between Plautus And Terence

Plau­tus and Ter­ence are about as dif­fer­ent as two play­wrights work­ing in the same genre could be. If Plau­tus is Robin Williams, then Ter­ence is Jer­ry Sein­feld. If Plau­tus is Queen, then Ter­ence is Radio­head. If Plau­tus were alive today, he would have direct­ed Ani­mal House; if Ter­ence were, we would praise his Side­ways. The dif­fer­ences run deep­er than the char­ac­ter­i­za­tions and the moods cre­at­ed – they affect even the lan­guage the play­wrights use. 

For instance, if you glance at the tables below, you’ll see that Plau­tus uses indi­rect ques­tions with the indica­tive more often – sig­nif­i­cant­ly more – than Terence. 

Here’s the sum­ma­ry for Plautus:

Now check out Terence:

So you see that of all the indi­rect ques­tions in Plau­tus, 27.0% have the indica­tive; few­er – 19.7% –  have the indica­tive in Ter­ence. Why is that? 

One idea is that Terence’s plays rep­re­sent a lat­er stage in the lan­guage – he wrote some forty years after Plau­tus was active – so that, in the lat­er play­wright, we see an advance towards the norm of Clas­si­cal Latin: sub­junc­tive in the sub­or­di­nate ques­tion clause.

Anoth­er idea rests on Terence’s cul­ti­va­tion of a sup­ple, ele­gant style: Cicero and Cae­sar were such avid read­ers of Ter­ence that they wrote epi­grams on Terence’s lec­tus “care­ful­ly cho­sen” (Cicero), purus “gram­mat­i­cal­ly clean” (Cae­sar) ser­mo (“gram­mat­i­cal­ly clean”, yes, he says, but not fun­ny at all). Is the high inci­dence of the sub­junc­tive, then, a sign of Terence’s care­ful writing? 

To check this, I decid­ed to com­pare my cor­pus of infor­mal Ear­ly Latin (most­ly com­e­dy, but also Lucil­ius’ satires); against the data pulled from styl­is­ti­cal­ly ele­vat­ed Latin – includ­ing the frag­ments of tragedy and Roman his­tor­i­cal plays, the prae­tex­tae – about 1700 vers­es or parts of vers­es in Otto Ribbeck’s third edi­tion of the frag­ments, in addi­tion to epic, his­to­ri­ans (none of whose works exist in their entire), and oth­er prose writ­ers (most­ly Cato). 

In seri­ous gen­res, the indica­tive in the sub­or­di­nate clause occurs less fre­quent­ly than in light gen­res. The dif­fer­ence between the two pro­por­tions – 14.3% for seri­ous writ­ing and 25.1% for light gen­res – is sig­nif­i­cant. What this meant to me was that indica­tives in sub­or­di­nate ques­tion claus­es were prob­a­bly part of the infor­mal, col­lo­qui­al reg­is­ter of the language.

VII. The Big Takeaway

Recent research for Clas­si­cal Latin has shown that the indica­tive used in sub­or­di­nate indi­rect ques­tion claus­es was a phe­nom­e­non of a more relaxed style of speech. Even such a gram­mat­i­cal purist as Cae­sar, when writ­ing a let­ter, lets such an indica­tive slip in (Att.9.7c.1.5–6). Such must have been the case in the Ear­ly Latin peri­od, too: the indica­tive abound­ed in less care­ful speech – the kind of speech of the quick­ly dashed off note; of a casu­al con­ver­sa­tion; of a com­ic dia­logue. In a word, there’s a basic con­ti­nu­ity – at least in indi­rect ques­tion usage – between the Ear­ly Latin and Clas­si­cal Latin period. 

That indi­rect ques­tion-claus­es con­tain­ing indica­tives mark an infor­mal style goes togeth­er with oth­er find­ings on Roman com­e­dy: one study, for instance, shows that con­trac­tions like currendum’st (< cur­ren­dum est Ps. 331) and molestu’s (< moles­tus es, Mer. 767), are char­ac­ter­is­tic of infor­mal speech, too. In this respect, also, Roman com­e­dy imi­tates the con­ver­sa­tion­al style, just as this blog­post does, with its con­trac­tions, occa­sion­al sen­tence frag­ments, and bor­row­ings from the lex­i­con of infor­mal speech, like “inter­jec­tion­al ‘well’”.